The answer to this question used to be FreeOTFE (); sadly, the project has not been updated for three years and its website () is no longer online.

Is there any software available now that can be used to access LUKS/dm-crypt volumes from Windows, now that FreeOTFE is no longer maintained/available?

2

4 Answers

LibreCrypt (formerly DoxBox, itself formerly FreeOTFE) offers LUKS-compatible disk encryption for Windows. It will also open legacy FreeOTFE volumes.

4

WSL 2 on Windows10

Windows allows now to mount physical disks using the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL).

For people who are not familiar with WSL2:

... Windows Subsystem for Linux is a compatibility layer for running Linux binary executables natively on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019. In May 2019, WSL 2 was announced, introducing important changes such as a real Linux kernel, through a subset of Hyper-V features. ...

find more on Wikipedia

The Windows 10 WSL2 now supports a mount command for linux filesystems called wsl.

First of all you have to install WSL2 on your windows10+ release. I recommend to simply follow the microsoft installation guide.

Now you can use apt commands as common on ubuntu/debian systems

sudo apt install cryptsetup

and use thecryptsetup luksOpen command.

Previous WSL didn't support CRYPT, and you had to recompile the kernel. To check if DM_CRYPT is supported on your system, open a wsl2 terminal and type the following command:

cat /proc/config.gz | gunzip | grep CONFIG_DM_CRYPT

The output should be CONFIG_DM_CRYPT=y without a hash (# ), and =y should be set.

2

FreeOTFE from 2010, although abandonware, is still available for download from here.

However, while as far as I know it is the only solution of its kind, there were still reports of problems and bugs with this product. Therefore @Kibbee's comment of using in Windows a Linux virtual machine might be the safest way to go.

I don't know of any successors to FreeOTFE.

I remark that Truecrypt is an excellent alternative to LUKS/dm-crypt, available on both Linux and Windows and still under development.

9

As other commentors have mentioned, one approach is to use a VM running linux and copy the files out. For the sake of this process being easier to run for others, and for me when I want to do this again. These are the steps I followed:

• Install VirtualBox
• If you are mounting from USB you probably need to add the USB3 extension pack from here
• Download debian linux from osboxes and add a virtualbox image from this
• Add a usb device from the preferences for this device
• Install cryptsetup apt-get install cryptsetup
• Run cryptsetup open /dev/$BLAH encrypted
• You should then be able to mount /dev/mapper/encrypted and read files.

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